Chemical engineering is a branch of engineering that deals primarily with the application of chemistry, physics and other fields of physical science, as well as mathematics. These areas of knowledge are put toward the conversion of raw materials or chemicals into more valuable or useful forms. Chemical engineering is also concerned with innovations involving new materials and techniques and as such is an important type of research and development for many industries.

More recently, chemical engineering has come to encompass many more processing than those that could only be classified as related to chemical engineering. Nowadays chemical engineers are involved in the development and production of a wide spectrum of products, as well as in specialty and commodity chemicals.

The newer types of products into which modern chemical engineering techniques an products are put, include such things as high performance materials used in the automotive, aerospace, biomedical, electronic, military and environmental industries for all different kinds of applications.

Some example product applications for chemical engineering include ultra strong fibers, adhesives and fabrics for vehicles, bio compatible materials for prosthetics and implants, pharmaceuticals, gels for medical applications, films with spectroscopic or optical attributes for opto-electronic devices and many other specialty materials for various applications.

Chemical engineering is also often combined with biomedical engineering and biology for many medical applications, from practical and daily treatment materials to surgical implants and other more critical applications. Many chemical engineers work on biological projects like mapping the human genome and understanding biopolymers.

The American Institute of Chemical Engineering website at http://www.aiche.org/ is a wonderfully informative website full of the latest chemical engineering news, job information, discussion forums and so much more.

Tags : engineer, engineering, chemical, chemical engineering, automotive, aerospace, biomedical, electronic, biology

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 8:00 am and is filed under Chemical Engineering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.